To most modern Britons the words ‘Yule Log’ probably bring to mind that masterstroke of marketing that has enabled supermarkets to sell an ordinary chocolate roulade (with the addition of a plastic sprig of holly) as a speciality item for the Christmas table.

But the edible Yule Log of our own day – to an even greater extent than the meat-free mince pies of modern Christmas – is a mere shadow of what it once was. The original Yule Log was an actual log – in theory, an enormous one that was large enough to burn between Christmas Eve and Twelfth Night (5 January). Its evocative name preserved the pre-Christian Old English word for the midwinter festival, Geol.

The wide diffusion of Yule Log traditions across the Germanic, Baltic, Finnic and Slavic worlds – and even as far afield as Spain and Italy – suggests we may be dealing here with a shared Indo-European tradition

The arrival of the Yule Log (on Christmas Eve) was at one time a moment of great festivity accompanied with singing and dancing – the early modern equivalent, perhaps, of the arrival of the Christmas tree in a 20th-century household. Some Yule Logs were so large........

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